Re: Don't buy into pre-orders for Apple II products

["Apple2Steward" <none@none.net>]

"osgeld" <kevin@hackaday.com> wrote in message 
99f40b1b-8391-4875-b3d1-f1b0930e033a@googlegroups.com">news:99f40b1b-8391-4875-b3d1-f1b0930e033a@googlegroups.com...
On Saturday, May 18, 2013 11:47:52 PM UTC-5, IUnknown wrote:
> > What amazes me the most isn't that Conrad is failing to give 
> > us regular updates as promised, but the fact that he couldn't 
> > produce one single piece of concrete evidence. Not a 
> > document, not a picture, absolutely nothing, but only scarce 
> > and vague words.
>
> >
>
>
>
> ^^ THIS. +++++
>
>
>
> What COMPLETELY amazes me is how he accepted shipment of the 
> cards
>
> without verifying that a single one of them actually worked.
>
>
>
> Fedex handles airbills in nearly every industrial center of the 
> world.
>
> If this were my build, I would have requested that they 
> 3-day-air a
>
> single card/engineering sample to me for verification and 
> validation.
>
> In the worst case, he would be out the money, but at least he 
> would
>
> have had some proof that working cards were inbound.... along 
> with
>
> pictures, videos, etc.
>
>
>
> It is comical to think that any reputable manufacturer would 
> have
>
> taken offense to this. Engineering samples are commonplace in 
> the
>
> electronics manufacturing world.

I think you may be overstating this a tad bit. Engineering 
samples usually come out of the engineering department, you whip 
up a board, have 10 made at a kick in the balls price, and 
proceed to make them up yourself.

you just dont send something off to some random fab and expect 
them to verify every functional detail, especially on a machine 
that is at best a niche hobby market in 2013 using custom 
software generated logic chips


But isn't that what Conrad says his friends in China did for him?


" I send the company an Apple IIGS ROM01, a spare ROM01 
motherboard, and 2 TransWarpGS cards in working order. This was 
not required, but for the sake of speed I provided them with all 
the components necessary to assemble a working TWGS card so they 
could test their work faster.

*  *  *

They produce a board from their GERBER file, assemble it and test 
it in the provided IIGS against the second working original TWGS 
I provided them by running various tests that I outlined for 
them. Once it passes, which it did, they produce my initial run 
of 50 cards and send them out to me as soon as I pay the second 
half of the fee."

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.sys.apple2/WQS9qFjfrF0/09O8koz47iIJ

Since you do this for a living, does this sound credible?

I'm amused that the same company that booted up a GS (how? - 
floppy, CFFA, microdrive) and ran "various tests," couldn't be 
troubled to send Conrad a few cellphone pictures.